RUSTLE Really Useful Stuff on Teaching, Learning Etc.
Summer 2010
Celebrating Excellent Teaching at Sussex It was a glorious day on campus on Thursday 3rd June as colleagues gathered in the new Fulton building for the annual Teaching and Learning Conference. Over 100 people from across the schools, professional services and partner colleges came together to applaud and cheer some of the Sussex Teaching Award winners for 2010 as they were presented with certificates by Clare Mackie, the new PVC for Teaching and Learning. Clare talked about the impact that teaching has on the lives of our graduates and told delegates how proud she was to be able to shake hands with the award winners because ‗the passion for teaching and learning in the university sometimes goes unnoticed‘. This special issue of RUSTLE is celebrating that passion and helping to spread the word about the winners‘ successful approaches to teaching. Following an extensive review in 2009, for this year‘s awards students were encouraged to make nominations and on the following pages you can find out what it is that the award winners‘ students appreciate so much. There are articles on interactive lecturing, student-centred teaching, the role of learning communities, supervising student projects, the value of ‗real-world‘ experience, building students‘ confidence and approaches to putting new ideas into practice. As part of the increased role for the Schools in this year‘s awards, there were some named themed awards to empha-
size local priorities so you can read about the winners of an award for Technology-Enhanced Learning. And the awards now also recognise teaching teams so the Professional Services staff working on the Effective Researcher workshops got together to share their approaches to teaching as part of a team. For the winners of Sussex Teaching Awards, and last year‘s winners, there was also the chance to apply for a new University Teaching Fellowship. Eight staff put forward proposals for teaching and learning projects that they wanted to develop with the help of the £2000 Fellowships. It was intended to award 3 fellowships, but the standard was so high that 4 awards were made. The Teaching Fellows will be presented at the Summer Graduation ceremonies and it is hoped that the Fellowships will help them in building a profile to support them in national external teaching award competitions, such as the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme. In this issue you can read about the exciting projects being undertaken, and next year RUSTLE will be reporting on the outcomes of the projects.
Further details of the Sussex Teaching Awards and Fellowship scheme can be found on the TLDU web pages at: www.sussex.ac.uk/tldu/awards/sta
The Teaching Award Winners for 2010 are: Sergio Catignani, Global Studies; Andrew Chitty, History, Art History and Philosophy; Diana Conyers, Institute of Development Studies; Abi Curtis, English; Dimitrios Dalakoglou, Global Studies; Andrew Duff, Media, Film and Music; Darrell Evans, Brighton & Sussex Medical School; Ana Fernandes, Business, Management and Economics; David Harper, Life Sciences; Philip Harris, Mathematical and Physical Sciences; Alvaro Herrera, Business, Management and Economics; Graham Hole, Psychology; Jessica Horst, Psychology; David Howlett, Brighton and Sussex Medical School; Istvan Kiss, Mathematical and Physical Sciences; Margarete Kohlenbach, English; Andrew Liddle, Mathematical and Physical Sciences; Julie Litchfield, Business, Management and Economics; Chris Long, Engineering & Design; Graham McAllister, Informatics; Ben Oliver, Media, Film and Music; Pollyanna Ruiz, Media, Film and Music; Yusuf Sayed, Education and Social Work; Josh Siepel, Business, Management and Economics; Daniel Steuer, English; Celine Surprenant, English; Gonzalo Varela, Business, Management and Economics; Claire Ward, Careers and Employability Centre; and David Young, Informatics. Team Awards recognise: Paul Newbury and Phil Watten, for Technology-Enhanced Learning, Informatics; John Bateman, David Green, Emmet Hayes and Richard Sykes, Tutorial Fellows, Business, Management and Economics; Ross English, Catherine Reynolds, Sarah Robins-Hobden and Jannie Roed, Effective Researcher Team, Professional Services Group. This year’s Teaching Fellows are: Andrew Chitty, Philosophy; Fiona Courage, Special Collections; David Green, Business, Management and Economics and Sarah King, Psychology.
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Sussex Teaching Fellowship Projects Four Teaching Fellowships have been awarded for 2010 and these brief outlines will give you a flavour of the diverse and exciting projects which the Fellows will be undertaking in the coming year. Andrew Chitty (Philosophy) will be investigating ways in which student-moderated online discussion forums, such as those in Study Direct, can assist with teaching, and in particular for international students. In the context of increasing student expectations and time pressures for tutors Andrew sees the discussion forums provided by Study Direct as a potentially valuable resource for enhancing learning by supplementing face-to-face teaching with asynchronous online discussion. Such discussion provides an opportunity for students to express their ideas that is intermediate between contributing to the give and take of a face-to-face seminar and producing a formal essay or dissertation. Andrew suggests encouraging students to act as moderators of asynchronous online discussions which should economise on tutor time, reduce the inhibition on student participation which tutor moderation can create and help students to acquire an important skill. Andrew will be looking at the conditions that motivate or do not motivate students to participate meaningfully in student-moderated online discussion, and what students find or do not find valuable about those discussions.
Fiona Courage (Library Special Collections) will look at ways in which colleagues can use the primary source materials held in the University's Special Collections to develop models of innovative teaching. Fiona wants to further develop the incorporation of Special Collections into teaching at Sussex, benefiting both the students‘ acquisition of skills and the profile of teaching and Special Collections at a national and international level. As part of her project, Fiona will be visiting innovative projects currently being undertaken in the USA, for example at Emory University's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL) Department, to discuss how successful teaching models can be developed using digital or digitised collections at individual institutions and in partnerships. The fellowship will also highlight the opportunities for partnership in funded projects with academics at the University of Sussex and beyond.
David Green (Business, Management and Economics) aims to help Sussex to launch a bestpractice student-placement scheme. BMEc is currently validating a course which will provide a third year placement on four-year Undergraduate degree programmes which will require the identification, selection and management by the University of possibly several hundred places for students with suitable employers for a period of one year during which time the students will need to be monitored through a process of visits. At each stage of the process there are choices to be made and David will be using his Fellowship to research best practice in several aspects of this placement process. Drawing on literature and relevant experience from other institutions, David wants to launch a best practice placement scheme at Sussex which can be disseminated to the HE community. In particular, David will be exploring what makes a ‗suitable‘ placement, how we can best manage the experience and assess the placement from the student perspective and the employer perspective.
Sarah King (Psychology) supervises final year project students in a molecular laboratory and will be testing a new time and cost efficient model of project supervision. Students will begin learning techniques through a series of small group mini-practical classes. They will then consolidate this learning by designing and carrying out independent research with supervisory support. The students should be more empowered when developing their research hypotheses as they will have prior experience of available techniques. The proposed design is anticipated to reduce faculty contact hours while maintaining individual student contact and enhancing student engagement. Sarah aims to produce a good practice document/teaching template that can be shared across Schools with faculty running projects in molecular laboratories or other areas requiring similar intensive training.
Web Links Sussex Teaching Awards and Fellowships: www.sussex.ac.uk/tldu/awards/sta 2
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Interactive Lecturing and Beyond Lectures have often been criticised for providing students with a passive learning experience and it is widely held that the key to a good lecture is to engage students by making it ‗interactive‘, but this can be a challenge for lecturers. One person who has risen to this challenge is Darrell Evans (Brighton and Sussex Medical School) whose passion for teaching has led him to seek out opportunities for interactivity across the whole range of his practice, from small group teaching in dissecting labs to large lecture classes. Darrell has won his second Sussex Teaching Award this year and has been praised by students for the way his interactive lectures engage them, so RUSTLE asked him what it is that makes his lectures different. Certainly, Darrell‘s lectures could never be described as a passive learning experience because he makes sure that students get ‗a real session within a lecture theatre‘.
think is correct by showing a coloured card everyone gets involved. He explains that there is an ‗instant reaction … and if they are not all with me I can go over the point in another way, or ask again at end of lecture to see if they have changed their minds‘. This method, which can also be carried out using the Personal Response System ‗clickers‘ that are available to borrow from TLDU, means that students are more relaxed about giving an answer. As well as
‗We need to take responsibility as lecturers for making lectures events‘ getting everyone thinking it also makes a break in the lecture. Darrell explains that he uses ‗two or three questions during a 50 minute lecture to break things up – then students are ready to concentrate again on the next bit of the lecture‘. But keeping students engaged during the lecture is only part of the story. Darrell uses a sequence of resources and activities to maintain student engagement and interaction with the course during non-contact hours.
Darrell explains that ‗interactivity means that you engage all of the students as much of the time as possible and will attempt it in different ways‘ and one of the ways that he does it is by being very energetic himself. ‗I am all over the place in the lecture and no student should be surprised to find me standing beside them - I can then jog a student and ask them what they think about a particular point‘. The subject of anatomy also offers opportunities for getting students to physically engage by experimenting with their own bodies, for example flexing muscles and feeling the results and Darrell gets volunteers to come to the front and uses them to demonstrate anatomical processes like breathing. This approach creates an expectation of student participation - what Darrell calls an ‗interactive platform‘.
Before the lecture, the PowerPoint slides are posted on the VLE. Darrell thinks it is important to give students material in advance because it ‗allows students to determine their own learning route‘ – some bring laptops or print out the slides to annotate during the lecture, while others, knowing that they do not need to copy everything down take the opportunity to just listen and engage. Some lecturers are concerned that providing slides or notes in advance will discourage students from attending, but Darrell finds that ‗attendance is still excellent because a lecture is much more than the lecture notes … the lecture puts the slides into perspective‘. The lecturer can show the journey of development in a way that the slides alone cannot and it is this ‗added value‘ that students get from turning up at lectures.
Fun is another key feature of Darrell‘s lectures. He jokes that he is known as the ‗Blue Peter man‘ because he always brings in something made with sticky-back plastic. These homemade anatomy models cause a bit of a giggle, but serve a very serious purpose. The sophisticated models available in the lab are more detailed, but would not be as effective in a lecture setting. Darrell‘s constructions are functional and ‗robust enough to throw around and get students to try things out for themselves‘ such as his model of the lungs made from a big bottle and a balloon. Darrell also has his own version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire which he calls Who Wants to be an Anatomist and runs using coloured cards. Often when a lecturer asks a question it is met with silence, but when Darrell poses a question and asks students to vote for the answer they
More recently, Darrell has been augmenting lecture notes with screencasts – short mini-lectures of 3-5 minutes with a few key slides from the lecture and an audio track to serve as an introduction or recap of the main points. These screencasts were originally conceived of as revision aids, (Continued on page 4)
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especially for audio learners, but Darrell has found that when they are available before the lecture they are a great benefit to students, especially dyslexic and international students who find it useful to familiarise themselves with the specialist vocabulary of the topic in advance of the lecture. The screencasts mean that students are interacting with lectures at any point during the course that suits their learning style – some will access them in advance, others soon after the lecture to check their grasp of the key points and many nearer the assessment point as a revision tool. It is clear from feedback that students appreciate and benefit from the opportunity to engage with their learning that lecturers like Darrell provide. This sort of approach is applicable across a wide range of disciplines and hopefully this article will have given you some ideas for your own teaching.
Web Links Creating and Using Interactive Lectures: http://cnx.org/content/m16599/latest/ Interactive Lectures in Geoscience: http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/interactive/index.html Quick-Thinks: https://tle.wisc.edu/solutions/lecturing/quick-thinks-interactive-lecture Effective Lecturing resources: https://studydirect.sussex.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=125702 More resources in the TLDU web links: www.sussex.ac.uk/tldu/resources/web
Doing it Together This year‘s teaching awards included a strand for Professional Services staff who have a teaching role and the cross-unit team of Ross English (Vitae South-East Hub, based at Sussex), Catherine Reynolds (Careers and Employability Centre), Sarah Robins-Hobden (Doctoral School) and Jannie Roed (Teaching and Learning Development Unit) received an award for the work they have done together on the Effective Researcher workshops. Effective Researcher is a professional development workshop for doctoral researchers originally developed by Vitae but modified by the Sussex team in response to feedback from Sussex participants. Jannie explains that ‗students are very focused on their doctoral work (as they should be) but this course gives them an opportunity to step back and consider their own development as researchers in the wider picture‘. The workshop, run at Sussex as a one day event, uses activities and games to illustrate lessons participants might learn as a doctoral researcher, because ‗being able to produce an excellent thesis may not land people the perfect job. Researchers need to be able to collaborate and think outside the box and it is those abilities that the course focuses on‘. Like many Vitae workshops, Effective Researcher is designed to be team taught, because it runs with quite a large group of D.Phil students from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds and is based on working in small groups to complete activities before coming back to plenary sessions. Ross says that this requires particular skills from the people running the workshop because it is about facilitation rather than teaching and that distinction is grasped very well at Sussex. There is no ‗telling‘ them how it is or how it should be. Vitae are delighted with what Sussex has done with the
Effective Researcher workshop and the teaching award has raised the profile of Sussex with this national organisation. The workshop ‗needs facilitators who are able to engage very well with small groups and move between groups with different dynamics, then work together as a team when groups come back together‘. That is not the way that most university teaching happens and it is rare that colleagues from different departments or units work together, but Catherine believes it is helpful to ‗bring together careers with skills development so that students think about career in its broadest sense and their own development early in the doctorate‘. The students who nominated the team evidently seem to benefit from the group teaching. Sarah thinks it works well because the team are all playing to their strengths, covering topics they are not just interested in but really excited about. Catherine adds that the members of the team complement each other well, sharing similarities in terms of approach whilst having different expertise there is a lot of respect and collegiality between the trainers. This atmosphere of collegiality and mutual respect allows the team to be very flexible. They have their principles and aims quite firmly in place and can then be quite responsive and creative about adapting the programme, and it has certainly evolved quickly as the team learn more and more about what works. Every time the workshop is held, feedback is used to develop it further so it is never the same and the team agree that running the workshops is ‗always fun and always different‘ and they are learning all the time from each other and from the participants. Building on their success this year the team will be running Effective Researcher workshops again in 2010/11 and hope to open them up to postdoctoral researchers too.
Web Links: Doctoral Researcher Development Resources: www.sussex.ac.uk/dr2 Vitae Effective Researcher page: www.vitae.ac.uk/effectiveresearcher Careers and Employability Centre: www.sussex.ac.uk/cdec/index.php Doctoral School Blog: www.doctoralschool.wordpress.com 4
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Student-centred learning with diverse groups: from computing to creative writing Colleagues from all sorts of different disciplines were recognised with Sussex Teaching Awards and it was interesting, when interviewing people for this Special issue of RUSTLE, to notice some of the common issues and approaches they talked about. For example, Abi Curtis, who teaches creative writing in the Centre for Community Engagement (CCE) and English, and David Young from Informatics both discussed the ways in which they respond to student diversity by adopting a student-centred approach. Whilst their contexts may be very different, the values and principles that underpin their teaching practice are remarkably similar. Much of Abi‘s teaching is on masters-level programmes and/or within CCE so many of her students are returning to education after a gap, which they can find quite challenging. David‘s students, while generally following more traditional educational routes, nonetheless come to his courses with different levels of computer programming skills and both lecturers have found ways to respond positively and effectively to those challenges. For David, a student-centred approach that involves ‗listening to students and reacting to what they find easy, what they find hard and what they are interested in‘ is key to engaging with them. By taking notice of what students can and cannot do he is able to respond to individual learning needs. That might sound like a difficult task, especially in a large group, but David finds that giving students open-ended activities is key. He plans tasks so that ‗everyone does something that makes them feel they are further ahead than when they started‘. Beginning with a rather basic task that students can be guided through in detail, he ensures that when that is done there is scope for more advanced students to take the work further. Abi too sees ‗tremendous diversity‘ on her courses, but in her case it tends to be ‗people from completely different backgrounds, professions and cultures sometimes, ranging in age from their 20s to 70s and sometimes studying against the odds, dealing with challenges that make it more difficult to learn … or at least less convenient than for many undergraduates‘ The student-centred approach works well with diverse groups on creative writing courses because ‗it
is all about responding to the work – what the student has tried to achieve with their writing and being sensitive to their individual ambitions for what they are trying to do‘. This helps to build confidence which Abi sees as crucial for people coming back into education: ‗You have to balance difficult material and challenge with not destroying people‘s confidence because if students are confident they learn better‘. David agrees, stressing that ‗students have to feel there is no such thing as a stupid question and to feel that they can trust you‘. Sometimes the hardest thing is getting students to engage with teachers and ask the questions they need to, so David argues that it is important to be sensitive to your attitude towards students and to provide opportunities and environments for them to ask those questions. There is a slightly different focus in creative writing where Abi sees her role as that of a facilitator ‗rather than the person who tells them what it is all about‘, but there is still a balance to be struck between planning and flexibility. She has a clear idea of the things that she wants students to take away from the session, but finds that she can then ‗allow it to organically take shape .. so it is always unexpected, always unknown and the students always run that energy‘. Informatics is not all about knowledge transfer either. David sees motivating students as key to effective learning and whenever possible uses demonstrations and meaningful activities to engage and challenge. That might mean setting up motion detectors in the lecture theatre, or using a camera and microscope to project images as he dissects an old computer. In a similar way, Abi‘s teaching motivates by making sessions relevant to students – in her case by running workshop sessions where people bring their creative work and ideas to share with one another. For both of these award winners, good teaching is about putting students‘ individual needs, interests and abilities at the centre of their practice - an approach which can be applied successfully across the broad range of subjects taught at Sussex.
Web Links: Student-Centred Learning: www.aishe.org/readings/2005-1/oneill-mcmahon-Tues_19th_Oct_SCL.html Inclusive Teaching Study Direct site: https://studydirect.sussex.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=8611 More links under ‗student-centred‘ in the TLDU web links: www.sussex.ac.uk/tldu/resources/web
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―It wasn‘t just me…‖ When interviewing Sussex Teaching Award winners it was noticeable how few of them felt that they were individually doing anything special, and it was not just the team award winners who talked about the contribution that others had made to the success of their teaching. Across campus, it seems, colleagues and students are getting together to build learning communities that are producing excellent results. Andrew Liddle and Philip Harris, the two winners from Physics and Astronomy both talked about the role that the Departmental Joint Committee (DJC) played in their awards. The DJC is a forum where ‗student representatives meet with the Head of Department and the Senior Tutor ... to air student views on any aspect of teaching and learning in an unintimidating setting with the assurance that they will be taken seriously‘. The DJC already organises its own awards for lecturers so it was not surprising that this was the body that dealt with the nominations for the Sussex Teaching Awards, but Andrew was keen to highlight how the work of the student representatives had also contributed to the success of his course. Nominated in part for the way in which he combined ‗challenge and support‘ for his students Andrew gives much of the credit for this to the way in which his students have supported each other, with peers working closely together to ‗bring the cohort along‘. The study room, which was created through the work of the DJC, is a valuable space for informal mentoring and peer support within and across years. This lack of division between year groups is characteristic of a department where lecturers and students also seem to have enviably close relationships. Andrew explained that he knew the students on his General Relativity course quite well because he had taught many of them twice before in previous years and thought that this helped to create a good learning environment. The friendly and collegial atmosphere, he suggested, is helped by the fact that ‗physicists, staff or student, tend to be quite like-minded and mutually supportive rather than competitive‘. This principle of like-minded people at all levels within a subject area coming together was also what inspired Abi Curtis (page 5) and Bethan Stevens (a doctoral student in English) to organise the Sussex Writers Series. The plan was to bring together people from creative writing courses and English literature under one banner. Abi and Bethan wanted to create a sense of writing community by putting on a series of events where ‗practising writers, some aca-
demics who have that mix of creative and critical and people with interdisciplinary creative writing interest like artists and scientists who also write, to visit, do readings, talk about their practice and sometimes run workshops with the students‘. The series has been really popular and it is hoped that it will be running for the foreseeable future. Something similar happened in International Relations, where Sergio Catignani worked with colleagues in Global Studies and Law to bring practitioners from the broad field of international relations to give evening lectures in the New Security Challenges Series. Often, such events are considered to be the preserve of faculty and doctoral students, but Sergio encouraged all his students to attend and a lot of first years went along. They enjoyed listening to people who were involved in the day-to-day work of international relations and found that the practice-based lectures helped them to tie theory and concepts from their studies to the real world. These activities that bring academics and students together within their discipline are great for developing a sense of community and similar ideas are being taken forward in a joint TLDU and Students‘ Union project helping students to set up societies for their school and to organise activities. Sergio is also keen to share the glory of his teaching award with the ‗brilliant Associate Tutors‘ (ATs) on his course. He says that Synne Laastad Dyvik, Thomas Bentley, Szu-Hung Fang, and Andrei Gomez deserve plaudits for the very crucial role they played in giving students a good learning experience - but his own attitude towards them no doubt played a part in the success of this teaching team. In the spirit of a learning community they met to discuss the course and as a new member of faculty Sergio was able to learn from the ATs‘ previous experience of the course and brainstorm possible changes with them. Mutual respect and trust meant that Sergio was able to outline what he wanted to achieve and give the tutors freedom to plan the details of seminars. So in the tradition of awards the world over, when we salute the Teaching Award winners we are reminded of the ways in which really good teachers work as part of wider groups of colleagues and students. At the Oscars it is the contribution of directors, writers and cameramen that the stars acknowledge, here it is the networks of support and innovation within and across Schools that are helping to produce the excellent teaching that the awards celebrate.
Web Links Physics Departmental Joint Committee: www.sussex.ac.uk/physics/about/djc School Societies: www.sussex.ac.uk/tldu/studentskills/societies 6
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Everyone‘s a Winner: quality guidance delivering good results in student projects Jessica Horst (Psychology) was nominated for a teaching award for her supervision of third year projects so RUSTLE asked Jessica and Naureen Abubacker, one of her students, what is different about her approach to this type of teaching. When we think of teaching and learning situations we tend to think of lectures and seminars – it is not very common to think of students working on projects in the laboratory as a teaching opportunity, although we do expect students to be learning independently. Jessica, however, sees the third year project course that she is involved in as a class and her students really appreciate the additional guidance and support that they get from this approach. Not all the extra support comes from Jessica, though. One of the strengths that Naureen sees in the way Jessica runs the project is the high level of peer support that it encourages. In 2009-10, there were about eight third-years carrying out projects with Jessica and as well as meeting them individually, she arranged a weekly group meeting so that everyone got together regularly. This meeting was an opportunity to make general announcements and catch up on the individual studies being carried out. Jessica feels that the ‗hidden peer pressure‘ of this progress-checking makes students more accountable during the process. Most of the meeting, however, was spent in reading papers, which Jessica and Naureen see as having several benefits. Jessica is only halfjoking when she says that it motivates her to read new publications, and talking through the papers with students helps them to learn ‗the technique of writing papers – what works well, or not‘. The intention is that students will be able to write a good quality journal article at the end of the project, so the readings provide models as well as information. Jessica chooses papers that are of general interest as well as specifically focused on one topic that relates to one or more of the students‘ projects. Naureen says that regular readings gave her a wider knowledge of the subject, rather than just her own project: ‗it was really good, interesting and motivating and meant that we did not just get stuck in one piece of work but worked together really well as a team as we all had an interest in each other‘s work‘. There was a really good group dynamic, with students working together in the lab and sharing resources and Jessica believes that it ‗helps morale Some of the toys that were used in experiments with 3-4 when students see that we are working together and all have year olds to study their use of language. the common goal of advancing science‘. The third year projects are all research that Jessica wants to see succeed and wants to be able to publish so she is really invested in the work. Similarly, the students want to put in the extra work because it is ‗real scientific research rather than just a topic for a dissertation‘. An authentic project like this also gives students a taste of the workplace and helps to develop relevant skills. Naureen says the project work has directly influenced her views on a career, and given her confidence in the transferable skills she has developed: ‗I don‘t like the idea now of being in a job where there is no-one around me, I really liked the teamwork involved and it has given me the skills that I can use later on. In job interviews this is one of the things you talk about and people are really impressed with the amount of work we put in recruiting participants, promoting the lab and helping everyone else on the team. Team work is a massive thing out there in the future.‘ Jessica admits that at the beginning of her career she shared many postgraduates‘ perspective that ‗undergrads were in the lab to do work no-one wants to do.‘ But when she realised that they were doing their projects as a course and decided to treat it as such she found that she suddenly had more patience: ‗answering questions was not a distraction, but an opportunity to explain things … I am here to offer them something they won‘t be getting from their books‘. Now working with students in the lab is a favourite part of Jessica‘s job and Naureen feels that they are really benefitting because as she says: ‗It is nice to be learning independently but to have some guidance. This is the first time we have done a research project and we need that support – we have never done the practical stuff before‘. For Jessica, the time she has spent with the students has been a good investment because although some of the experiments could not be completed within one academic year she thinks that she can publish five of the projects. The guidance she offers the students is vital to this level of success, because, as she says: ‗If I want a lab situation where I think I can publish the data the students are collecting that means training them to a certain level so that I can be confident in the data they are collecting. It takes a lot of time in October getting everyone ready to go and up to the point where they can be left alone to get on with it — but it is well worth it. I get something really tangible out of it.‘
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Teaching by TV: technology-enhanced learning This year‘s teaching award scheme gave Schools the opportunity to make themed awards and Informatics made such an award for technology-enhanced learning. Paul Newbury and Phil Watten who received the award are using a broadcast studio to produce online support materials, record lectures and student presentations – they have even produced a virtual open day using the television technology. They use the studio and specially developed production techniques to create television-quality video demonstrations to support students in workshops, reducing the number of tutors required, and short videos responding to questions raised in the Study Direct forum. By delivering bite-size videos addressing particular concepts that are proving challenging to students they are able to provide a high level of support and extend engagement with the course beyond contact hours. Initially they were responding to student questions, but now they have built up a collection of these online support materials and find that students are asking fewer, but more advanced questions suggesting that they are using and benefitting from the additional resources. Students are keener to watch video material than to read and although Paul and Phil want their students to read too, the resources that they are creating are accessible to a wide range of students. They have been able to provide support for deaf students by adding signing in real time and the broadcasts can be played whenever and wherever students want – even on an iPhone.
Students get their turn on camera too because Paul and Phil use the studio to record their presentations. Peers see the broadcast ‗live‘ and presenters can review their performance later, giving them a lot of feedback they would not usually get. In an increasingly media-focused society, the sorts of presentation skills which this develops are important for graduates. Paul and Phil also record their lectures and Phil explained how what they are doing differs from capturing lectures using Echo 360: ‗it is the difference between making a television programme and recording a live performance – one is designed for television, the other is designed for a live-only audience and there is a different way of interacting with it. This is not capturing a live lecture, it is producing a lecture for online consumption‘. They see their productions as being more like the Royal Institute Christmas Lectures, or the TV news, where a presenter is seen with a few images that illustrate what they are saying. Phil explained why they think it is so important to see the lecturer rather than focusing on the slides: ‗the main flow of information is from the lecturer and that includes non-verbal communication – most of the material is not on the slides‘. Despite this different emphasis, many of the advantages for student learning are similar to other forms of lecture capture. Traditionally students attend a lecture and spend a lot of time making notes which may not involve thinking very much about what they are writing, but when students know that the lecture is being recorded they are freed to listen, think and participate, because they can play the lecture again later. Recorded lectures are also of huge benefit to students with specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia or for those studying in a second language. Using the broadcast studio, however, is a very different way of presenting than most lecturers are used to. Phil explains that ‗you cannot be as relaxed as when you are talking normally and need to work out beforehand exactly what you are going to say – almost like a script‘, but once the lecture is given the recording is available very quickly because the cameras are ‗cut‘ in real time and there is no editing afterwards. Paul and Phil have so far been mainly using this technology on graphical multi-media courses but they are keen to extend it to other Informatics courses and explore how it might work in other disciplines.
Web Links and Contacts See some of Paul and Phil‘s lectures: www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/mtllive/videos.php Technologies to support teaching and learning at Sussex: www.sussex.ac.uk/tldu/technology Sussex E-Learning website: www.sussex.ac.uk/elearning/ Phil Watten: p.l.watten@sussex.ac.uk 8
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Jolly Good Fellows: the value of experience One of the team teaching awards went to a group of tutorial fellows from Business, Management and Economics. Unlike the Effective Researcher team (page 4) John Bateman, David Green, Emmet Hayes and Richard Sykes do not teach together, but they do have a lot in common and support each other informally. Their backgrounds are in Further Education, teaching professional programmes, commercial teaching, business and industry. This means that they bring a wealth of ‗real-world‘ experience, relevant contemporary knowledge and a passion for teaching to their Sussex students. Across campus there are numerous examples of people like John, David, Emmet and Richard who bring their practitioner experience into the university setting, for example, Abi Curtis (page 5) is a working and published poet as well as teaching creative writing and the Centre for Community Engagement (CCE) involves many tutors from outside mainstream academia in teaching. Education and Social Work teaching depends on teachers and social workers coming in to share their work-based knowledge with students and the medical school has GPs and other practising doctors contributing to programmes. David explained that in Business and Management ‗it is applied knowledge we are dealing with – teaching about today‘s problems today, in marketing, corporate governance etc.‘ so the tutorial fellows‘ understanding of the ‗postcredit crunch business environment‘ is invaluable. They can draw on their professional experience to explain to students not only ‗how it works in the real world‘ but also the relevance of the course they are studying – in short, ‗why they have got to know it‘. Which is why they do not just rely on their own experience but look for innovative and interesting ways for students to engage in realistic activities. For example, last year they organised an international decisionmaking game where students from Sussex and two universities from the United States worked in transatlantic teams. The game was played in real time over the course of a week giving students an intensive online experience using several platforms. Students really ‗entered into the spirit of the thing‘ and were excited about the game, even getting up at 3am to catch their team-mates in the USA. The group‘s shared passion for teaching which grew in more diverse educational settings includes an ethos of supporting students through their degree, and they see themselves as ‗destinations driven‘ - their job is not done until
graduates are launched on their own careers. It is not surprising, then, that David has chosen to focus on student placements during his Teaching Fellowship (page 2). John, David, Emmet and Richard were drawn to the University of Sussex because of its reputation and really enjoy teaching here. Sussex students, they say are ‗very motivated … the easiest people in the world to teach, if you treat them fairly, honestly and openly‘ and their students clearly appreciate what they do. The teaching award for the team is another example of the positive feedback they get from their students, feedback that they say is ‗crucial‘ to help them make the students‘ learning experience even better. One next step they see is to internationalise the
teaching at Sussex and develop existing research links to include teaching so that graduates are prepared for a global workplace. As Emmet explained, ‗business is global - if something does not work worldwide it is not worth doing it‘ and our students need a ‗global education‘ that will work as a currency for them – anytime, anywhere.
Do you want to develop your teaching practice? And perhaps get recognition? There are lots of opportunities and resources available from the Teaching and Learning Development Unit (TLDU) at Sussex. There are one-off events of one to two hours on a wide range of topics, courses for Associate Tutors leading to HEA recognition and the Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (PGCertHE) leading to Fellowship of the HEA. There are also extensive resources on the TLDU web pages including over 800 web links arranged by topic, the In at the deep end booklet, back issues of RUSTLE and links to external events. Teaching and Learning Development Events: www.sussex.ac.uk/tldu/events/tldevents Courses and recognition for Associate Tutors at Sussex: www.sussex.ac.uk/tldu/events/at Sussex PGCertHE: www.sussex.ac.uk/tldu/events/pgcert Resources from TLDU: www.sussex.ac.uk/tldu/resources HEA Events: www.sussex.ac.uk/tldu/events/heaevents Or contact TLDU on tldu@sussex.ac.uk 9
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Making Learning Possible Students‘ learning is often hampered by lack of confidence or a sense of disorientation and two of the Sussex Teaching Award winners talked about their relationships with students and approaches to teaching that they think help to make learning possible. Christopher Long (Engineering and Design) teaches masters level thermo dynamics to students, most of whom come from an electronics background and expect to struggle with this ‗hardcore mechanical engineering‘. Christopher‘s approach is to ‗not make it difficult or complicated‘ – after all, he says, his students all have A-level physics or the equivalent and it is all based on that. Pollyanna Ruiz (Media, Film and Music) also builds her students‘ confidence by letting them know that she wants them all to do well, setting expectations of success and explaining that ‗finding it difficult doesn‘t mean that you can‘t do it‘. Building on what students already understand is key to Pollyanna‘s teaching too. She came back in to Higher EducaTeaching is not a one-man show, you don‘t tion from a spell overseas and remembers feeling a bit lost in just turn up and perform your thing – the course: ‗I was unable to make any connection between weekly topics … everything seemed random‘. So now that she you engage and you react to what your is teaching Pollyanna makes sure that she makes links so that students are doing‘ ‗students come away with a wider understanding of where Pollyanna Ruiz things sit in relation to each other rather than with little fragments of knowledge‘. Both these award winners are clearly focusing on the specific needs and abilities of their students, but they also think about the dynamics of the relationship that they have with their students. Respect is key for Christopher who says that he tries to ‗treat students with respect, as human beings, rather than maintaining a teacher/pupil relationship which does not do education any good‘. He believes that such a relationship erects a barrier and makes students think that teachers are always right, which ‗does not encourage students to ask questions and to be critical‘. Christopher finds that it is particularly important to break down such barriers with international students, some of whom come from educational cultures where criticality is not encouraged. Pollyanna teaches on a support course for international students and finds that students from more ‗topdown‘ educational systems are expecting the lecturer to tell them the answer. Over time they work out the differences, but Pollyanna‘s course helps to speed up the process so that they are not missing out. When redefining the traditional teacher / student relationship it is important not to leave students feeling lost and Pollyanna describes finding that balance when she talks about ‗creating an environment in which people have confidence that they are going to be guided through things, but also giving them the scope to run with the things that they find interesting‘. This applies to all students, because as Pollyanna explains the difficulties that some international students experience are a magnification of difficulties that all students share: ‗fear of talking in a seminar group is much worse in a second language‘ but that fear is there for home students too. To motivate his students and help them to see the simplicity and relevance of the material Christopher illustrates lectures with practical applications, which sometimes means bringing along his windsurfing mast, sail and boom to demonstrate aerodynamics. He would like to do much more of these ‗hands-on‘ demonstrations but moving engines between teaching rooms is not a practical possibility. Pollyanna helps her students to get the most from seminars by setting small group tasks that ‗give them space to rehearse what they are going to say in the bigger group and to see that the idea they have had is similar to other people‘s and they are on the right track‘. She also makes students change seats each week so that they talk to different people and get to know each other, building trust in the group. But all this requires preparation so that students feel comfortable in the knowledge that the teacher has a plan and Pollyanna emphasises the need to put effort in to ‗finding something in any topic that interests you so that you can interest them‘. Pollyanna and Christopher have both taken some of their approach from that advocated in language teaching and are keen advocates of peer observation as a way of reflecting on and developing your own practice. Pollyanna has a background in TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) where peer observation was a regular event and Christopher goes to evening classes to observe other teaching styles. He hit on this novel approach to professional development a few years ago when he went to classes to learn Spanish and found that he was paying as much attention to what the teacher was doing as learning Spanish. For both of them, the learning environment is a key building block for student success and getting that atmosphere right involves respect for students coupled with the preparation and enthusiasm to guide them through.
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Putting the Passion into Practice This issue of RUSTLE has been overflowing with the passion of some of the excellent teachers who have been awarded Sussex Teaching Awards. Often an enthusiasm for the subject leads to a desire to teach it to others, but that is only the beginning – the challenge then is to find ways to teach that motivate and excite students to learn.
post questions on the discussion forum so that ‗everyone gets an answer when someone is brave enough to ask a question‘. Sergio‘s students can also find Echo 360 recordings of lectures on Study Direct, but he is always looking for new ways to develop his use of technologyenhanced learning.
Philip Harris (Physics) and Sergio Catignani (International Relations) are two winners who demonstrate the innovative and questioning approach to teaching that characterizes all good teachers. It is not about adopting every new idea that comes your way or surprising your students with new activities every week, rather it is important to tailor innovations to your students and the context of the course.
There are, however, a lot of things that can be done to enliven teaching and improve learning without the use of 21st century gadgets. For example, Philip explained how his ‗workshops now have a 10 minute quiz at the start to encourage students to keep up with lectures, the middle section sees students working in groups on a specific task and the session ends with students coming up to the front to solve the problem on the board, helped by the other students‘. This new structure has resulted in increased attendance at workshops and better student engagement. Philip is able to mark the quizzes quickly and address any common problems at the start of the next lecture. He has also tried something new in terms of assessment and when marking essays or long lab reports he now breaks the mark down into ‗quite small bitesize elements‘ with each showing students how well they performed on a particular aspect of the assignment. This makes marking easier but at the same time gives students more feedback. As a further refinement Philip‘s marks add up to a maximum of 95, with the last 5 marks available to students for their own self-evaluation, which gets them thinking about their own work in relation to the marking criteria.
For Sergio, it is important to bring some fun to his lectures because he believes that ‗any activity should be done for fun – if you can inject fun into it, it makes it much easier‘. In his lectures Sergio uses cartoons, images, video and audio resources to challenge his students and underline parts of theory or an approach that he wants students to take. When lecturing on the Arab/Israeli conflict, for example, he uses the video of Rock the Casbah by punk rock group the Clash to introduce the topic, demonstrate how media representations are often based on a surface understanding of the conflict and show students that they must shed previous prejudices and be objective and sceptical. Philip faces the same challenge of keeping students‘ attention during a lecture and has found that pausing and asking students to talk to a neighbour about what they have not understood produces ‗very interesting questions – quite fundamental questions‘. While they are chatting Philip likes to ‗wander up to the back and talk to one or two and encourage them to come and ask questions‘. Checking understanding like this gives him the chance to clarify points in a timely way and it is an approach he wants to develop further by using Personal Response System ‗clickers‘. Sergio too sees technology as a way to maintain student engagement. He uses Study Direct as a centralised source of information but insists that learning on the VLE ‗needs to be interactive – like lectures‘. So he uses a news forum to send announcements, but also encourages students to
New ideas do not always work first time and it takes commitment and patience to find the approaches that work best in a particular context, but Philip likes to try out innovations and modify them for his own practice. This commitment to constantly developing practice is shared by many of the award winners and it is something that Sergio would like to see taken further: ‗Universities should be passionate about teaching – and these awards are a start. We are educating the future generation, we are highly influential in that respect and could be a force for good in making people think and to communicate ... We need to be more passionate about teaching, but it is not just about individuals becoming better teachers but also the institution enabling academics to be better‘.
Web Links Ideas and Guidance for teaching and learning at Sussex: www.sussex.ac.uk/tldu/ideas External resources (including images for teaching): www.sussex.ac.uk/tldu/resources/web Rock the Casbah video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4HPdWYwgyw Study Direct Features Demonstration: https://studydirect.sussex.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=2542 Self and Peer Assessment: ftp://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/TeachingGuides/fulltext.pdf Technologies to support teaching and learning at Sussex: www.sussex.ac.uk/tldu/technology 11
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National Teaching Fellowship for Sussex Statistics Guru It was announced on 24th June that Professor Andy Field (Psychology) has been awarded a prestigious National Teaching Fellowship. The National Teaching Fellowship Scheme which is celebrating its 10th year, recognises and rewards individual excellence in teaching in Higher Education. Organised by the Higher Education Academy (HEA) and funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) there are a maximum of 50 Fellowships awarded each year and competition for the honour and the £10,000 award is fierce. It is Andy‘s groundbreaking and dedicated work in the field of teaching statistics that has secured him the fellowship. He says he has spent his teaching career ‗trying to break down the barrier of anxiety to empower students to learn statistics‘ and he has done this, not only in his face-to-face teaching, but also through his revolutionary textbook Discovering Statistics Using SPSS (and sex and drugs and Rock ’n' Roll) and on his ‗Statistics Hell‘ web site. Andy‘s pedagogical philosophy focuses on engaging students so that they want to learn and gain confidence in a subject that too often causes students anxiety – despite the pressing need to equip graduates with ‗statistical literacy‘. His aim over the last 15 years has been to make statistics more engaging and less scary through using humour and lively examples, maintaining that ‗teaching statistics through examples and analogies to which students actively relate enables them to anchor statistical ideas to their own experiences and develop their own conceptual sense of what they have been taught‘. ‗Statistics Hell‘ reaches out to students of statistics far beyond the university and highlights Andy‘s commitment to supporting the diversity of student learning needs by catering for students who may not be able to attend lectures or laboratory classes because of disability. The materials he provides online also enable dyslexic students to work at the same level as their peers. The website has led to Andy mentoring
students around the world as each year he receives about 300 e-mails from students from other institutions asking for help with statistics – most of which he replies to in his own time. This generosity extends to the international community of statistics educators as he provides teaching resources that others can use on ‗Statistics Hell‘ and the web site that accompanies his book. The passion for teaching statistics which has motivated the book and web site is nowhere clearer than in Andy‘s lectures and his mentoring of the Associate Tutors who teach on his course. Statistics is often taught passively through equations and dry examples, but not in Andy‘s lectures where student participation, physical demonstrations, real data and fun prevail. A lecture with him could include a game of ‗butthead‘ to explain factor analysis or a chorus of ‗The Normality Song‘ sung to the tune of Britney Spears‘ Hit me baby one more time. Testimony to Andy‘s empathy, passion for teaching and ability to explain complex ideas in a clear and concise way has poured in from around the world and two Facebook groups set up by students who have never been taught by Andy sing his praises. He is not without plaudits at Sussex either, having won a Sussex Teaching Award in 2001and being voted Best Lecturer in the last two year‘s graduation yearbooks. There has also been national recognition from the British Psychological Society who gave Andy an Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Psychology in 2005 and presented him with the society‘s annual Book Award in 2007. Andy is the fifth National Teaching Fellow at Sussex joining Imogen Taylor (Social Work), Celia Hunt (Continuing Education), Duncan Mackrill (Education) and Catherine Reynolds (Careers and Employability). In addition to the work he already does with the HEA Psychology Network Andy will now become a member of the Association of National Teaching Fellows (ANTF) which facilitates networking amongst Fellows and promotes innovative practice.
Web Links Statistics Hell: www.statisticshell.com Discovering Statistics using SPSS companion website: www.uk.sagepub.com/field3e/main.htm HEA NTFS web pages: www.heacademy.ac.uk/ourwork/supportingindividuals/ntfs TLDU NTFS web pages: www.sussex.ac.uk/tldu/awards/hea/ntfs RUSTLE is produced by the Teaching and Learning Development Unit (TLDU) and is online at www.sussex.ac.uk/tldu/resources/rustle If you wish to comment or contribute please e-mail tldu@sussex.ac.uk
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